I just listened to an interview with Dr. Don Huber, a professor emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University. Huber’s five decades of agriculture research on soil-borne plant pathogens (disease-causing micro-organisms) has made him very concerned about the increasing use of glyphosate (Roundup®) pesticide.
Glyphosate is more than a herbicide – it was first patented as a mineral chelating agent and also as a powerful antibiotic. By taking certain minerals – calcium, magnesium, iron and manganese – out of the plant’s biochemical pathways, glyphosate makes it more susceptible to disease organisms, and it is the disease that actually kills the weeds.
As an antibiotic glyphosate also kills the beneficial soil bacteria (by disrupting certain amino acid pathways) that keep the disease organisms in check, so their populations explode. [I’d like to hear from farmers if they have found that regular crops are more susceptible to diseases on land that has been previously sprayed with glyphosate.]
Glyphosate has now been shown to accumulate in the edible parts of food crops and has been measured in blood, urine and breast milk of North Americans. It has been shown to lower the nutrient mineral content of food from crops sprayed with glyphosate. But more significant is its effect on our gut flora. As with the soil, glyphosate from our food preferentially destroys beneficial bacteria in our gut, causing many different health problems.
Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff in a paper published in April 2013 in the journal Entropy explain the physiological effects of glyphosate and link it to many modern chronic diseases. They explain that, as the industry claims, glyphosate’s acute toxicity is minimal, but its long-term chronic toxicity is a different story. Glyphosate toxicity has been documented for kidney cells at 10 ppm, liver at 1ppm, and the endocrine hormone system at 0.1 ppm, all of which are many times lower than toxicity levels of DDT. [Tobacco is another substance with low acute, but significant chronic, toxicity.]
So maybe glyphosate is more toxic than DDT!
For more information on this or other natural health topics, stop in and talk to Stan; for medical advice consult your licensed health practitioner.
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